Test of leadership ends in a triumph for one of the lads

Share via

Simon Barnes on the generosity of spirit that helped Andrew Flintoff to make his mark as England captain

AT THE end of the Ashes series I spent an hour or so with Andrew Flintoff. He was a delight: funny, easy, modest, vastly likeable. He refused to give pat answers, declined to hide behind the usual force field of clichés. He wanted me to have interesting stuff to write and that was an act of generosity that I deeply appreciated. It was rather later that I realised that it was also the key to the man.

In the course of our talk, the c-word inevitably came up. Did he fancy captaining England? It was a silly question, in a